BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Beware! Tree-Huggers Plot Evil to Save World

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: December 13, 2004

'State of Fear'
By Michael Crichton
603 pages. HarperCollins. $27.95.

The odious villains in Michael Crichton's new thriller, the folks (as President Bush might put it) who kill, maim and terrorize, aren't members of Al Qaeda or any other jihadi movement. They aren't Bondian bad guys like Goldfinger, Dr. No or Scaramanga. They aren't drug lords or gang members or associates of Tony Soprano.

No, the evil ones in ''State of Fear'' are tree-hugging environmentalists, believers in global warming, proponents of the Kyoto Protocol. Their surveillance operatives drive politically correct, hybrid Priuses; their hit men use an exotic, poisonous Australian octopus as their weapon of choice. Their unwitting (and sometimes, witting) allies are -- natch! -- the liberal media, trial lawyers, Hollywood celebrities, mainstream environmental groups (like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society) and other blue-state apparatchiks.

This might all be very amusing as a ''Saturday Night Live'' sketch, but Mr. Crichton doesn't seem to have amusement on his mind. This thriller comes equipped with footnotes, charts, an authorial manifesto and two appendixes (''Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous'' and ''Sources of Data for Graphs'').

The novel itself reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global warming disaster movie ''The Day After Tomorrow.'' In that special effects extravaganza, global warming (its dangers ignored by a Dick Cheneyesque vice president) is the enemy, leading to deadly climate changes and disturbances in the weather that leave New York flooded and frozen, and Los Angeles beset by swarms of killer tornadoes.

In Mr. Crichton's ham-handed novel, the dangers of global warming are nothing but a lot of hype: scare scenarios, promoted by shameless environmentalists eager to use bad science to raise money and draw attention to their cause. For that matter, the ludicrous plot revolves around efforts by radical members of an environmental group called NERF (National Environmental Resource Fund) to surreptitiously trigger a series of natural disasters including a supersize hurricane and a giant tsunami that would hit California with 60-foot waves; these disasters would be timed to coincide with the group's big media conference, thereby awakening the public to the dangers of climate change wrought by global warming.

As in earlier Crichton books, the characters in this novel practically come with Post-it notes on their foreheads indicating whether they are good guys or bad guys. The radical leaders of the environmentalists -- including the head of NERF, Nicholas Drake, an ascetic Ralph Nader type -- are ruthless control freaks (in another novel, they might well have been greedy corporate tycoons or power-mad politicians). Their followers are a bunch of self-righteous bubble-headed Gulfstream liberals, Hollywood types who drive sport utility vehicles while preaching the virtues of gasoline conservation. One tree-hugger, who will meet a particularly horrifying fate, shares the r?m?f the real-life actor and activist Martin Sheen: he is best known for having played the president of the United States in a once-popular television show.

As for Mr. Crichton's good guys -- the people trying to thwart the nefarious NERF plot to wreak natural destruction in the name of saving the planet -- they are led by a brainy former M.I.T. professor named John Kenner, who, it's suggested, knows everything about everything. Kenner is accompanied on his global peregrinations by a ''Jurassic Park''-like crew of handsome young people, who prove adept at surviving all manner of perils, from frostbite in Antarctica to death by multiple lightning strikes to captivity by cannibals in the South Pacific. People say standard-issue thriller things like ''Time is short, Sarah. Very short.'' That is, when they aren't dropping scientific terms like ''cavitation units'' and ''propagation time.''

One subplot in ''State of Fear'' involves the disappearance or death of a wealthy contributor to NERF; another, a proposed lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency to be filed by a small Pacific island nation. Half movie treatment, half ideological screed, ''State of Fear'' careers between action set pieces (the requisite car chases, shootouts and narrow escapes from grisly ends) and talky disquisitions full of technical language and cherry-picked facts meant to hammer home the author's points. And Mr. Crichton does indeed have a message, as an afterword titled ''Author's Message'' attests. Among his stated beliefs: ''I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don't think we have to worry about them.'' And: ''I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners'' for current failures in wilderness management.

In an appendix, he goes on to draw parallels between global warming theories and the notorious theory of eugenics floated a century ago: ''I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed.''Given these dogmatic assertions and his lumbering efforts to make the novel's story line illustrate these theories, it seems disingenuous in the extreme of Mr. Crichton to claim: ''Everybody has an agenda. Except me.'' Of course, he could simply be trying (like some of the characters in the novel) to drum up publicity for himself by being provocative and contrarian.

After all, it's hard to imagine people buying this sorry excuse for a thriller on its storytelling merits alone.